Has an editor or critique partner said, “Your character is flat” when offering feedback on your story? Or perhaps they worded it another way: “Your protagonist didn’t grab me,” or “This character needs more depth.”

However it’s phrased, being told we’ve missed the mark on a character is a bit of a gut punch. But it’s okay. Flat characters, like anything else, can be fixed.  

A flat character is one-dimensional, lacking the depth and human complexity required to feel true to life. Not only do they seem unrealistic, they also fail to capture a reader’s curiosity or interest.

Flat characters can be written as such on purpose: a surly shopkeeper unwilling to bargain on price or the nosy neighbor trying to unearth your protagonist’s secrets. These types of characters have a small role or specific function (comic relief, mentorship, etc.) and don’t need a lot of depth.

But if an important character is seen as
shallow or boring…we have a big problem.

Characters are the heart of a story. For readers to care about them, they must feel like real people. Distinct personalities, belief systems, emotions, and histories shape them and their behavior. Personal needs, desires, struggles, and worldviews give them depth. All this, and a capacity for growth, is the magic recipe that will draw a reader in. 

What Causes a Flat Character?

Characters can feel underdeveloped for many reasons, but it often comes down to one thing: something essential about them has been overlooked. Some common offenders:

Shallow Backstory

A character’s past influences who they become, how they behave, and how they view the world around them. If a character’s backstory is missing, weak, or generic, their behavior may lack credibility or be inconsistent.

The Cure: Go deeper. Explore their past, including their emotional wounds, experiences, life lessons, fears, and insecurities.

Tools to Fix Backstory Issues: The Emotional Wound Thesaurus and One Stop for Writers’ Character Builder Tool.

A Too-Basic Personality

A character’s personality should contain specific traits that emerge because of their history/upbringing, the people who influenced them, and formative their life experiences, both good and bad. When writers gloss over the building out of a unique personality, they tend to give character ‘typical’ traits and so they come across as generic and unrealistic.

The Cure: People are complex, and characters will be, too. Spend time thinking about who your character is and why, and the traits most likely to appear in their personality. Be sure to also understand how negative experiences lead to personality flaws (and the behaviors and tendencies that go with them). Each character should have a mix of traits as no one is ever all good or bad.  

Tools to Fix Personality Issues: The Positive Trait Thesaurus, The Negative Trait Thesaurus, and One Stop for Writers’ Character Builder Tool.

Over-Reliance on Character Tropes or Stereotypes

Due to their familiarity, using character tropes (e.g., the villain, reluctant hero, or absent-minded friend) can fast-track the reader’s understanding of a character’s role. But leaning on one too hard turns them into a stereotype or cliché, which is a huge turnoff.

The Cure: Use any trope generalizations as a starting point only. Do the work and make each character someone fresh. Readers loved to be surprised by interesting and meaningful qualities that elevate the character in ways they didn’t expect.

Tools to Help Fix Overused Character Types: The Character Trope and Type Thesaurus or One Stop for Writers’ Character Builder Tool.

Tunnel Vision

Characters who are only about one thing—the mission or goal, proving loyalty, success, etc.—come across as one-dimensional and unrealistic. For readers to connect with characters, they need to have relatable life layers. Relationships and social interactions. Dreams and desires. Responsibilities. Quirks, interests, problems.

The Cure: Real people can get obsessive about certain things, but they have other things going on. To give your character a better balance, imagine their entire life, not just the plot of your story. Explore how your character’s professional life or obsessions may collide with their personal life.

Tools to Help You Create Dynamic Characters: One Stop for Writers’ Character Builder Tool and The Occupation Thesaurus.

A Lack of Drive

In the real world, it can take time for us to know what we want, but in fiction, characters must be motivated and act. If your protagonist is wishy-washy about what they want or can’t settle on a goal, they’ll come off as weak.

The Cure: Characters who lack urgency when it comes to choosing or achieving a goal need to be put in the hot seat. Raise the stakes. Add conflict and tension. Make it clear that doing nothing leads only to pain and consequences. Additionally, know your character inside and out (#1) because past trauma, fears, and negative interactions will point you to their soft spots and unmet needs.

Tools to Fix Unmotivated Characters: The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, The Conflict Thesaurus Volume 1, Volume 2, and The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus.

Distanced Emotions

Showing a character’s emotion, even when they’re trying to hide what they feel, is one of the most important tasks a writer has. Emotions are central to the human experience, and readers expect a front-row seat to whatever the character is feeling. When someone is closed off or seems imperviable to vulnerability, readers find it unrealistic.

The Cure: Become an expert at showing your character’s emotions, even when they try to hide what they feel from others. Readers must always be in the loop to empathize and feel invested. Understand how each individual will express emotion in their own way based on their personality, comfort zone, and backstory.

Tools to Help You Show Authentic Character Emotion: The Emotion Thesaurus, The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus.

Inadequate Internal Conflict

A well-developed character should have inner struggles, doubts, conflicting needs, fears, and insecurities, all of which make certain actions and decisions agonizing for them. If a writer doesn’t know a character well enough, their struggles will seem generic and readers will feel disconnected from their struggles.

The Cure: Understand your character inside and out, especially backstory and unresolved wounds that haunt them (#1). Know their life, their stresses, their pain, and how loyalty, expectations, or beliefs may tear at them so you can show powerful, meaningful inner conflict. Use psychology in fiction to show inner turmoil in ways readers recognize as they’ve experienced the same tendencies themselves.  

Tools to Help You Show Internal Conflict and Psychological Processes: The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1, and The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus.

Little to No Growth or Change  

In any story, characters will face challenges—often life-changing ones. Even in a flat arc, where the protagonist remains steadfast in their beliefs, they should still learn, adapt, and navigate obstacles in a way that feels authentic. Primary characters who respond to every problem the same way, repeat mistakes without growth, or remain rigid in their viewpoints can feel unrealistic and unconvincing to readers.

The Cure: All roads lead back to characterization. Go deeper. Get to know your character, and why they think, act, and behave as they do. Choose specific conflict scenarios that force them to confront misconceptions and fears that lead to change and growth.

Tools to Help You Write About Change and Growth: For growth journeys and the path of change, try The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. The Conflict Thesaurus Volumes 1 and Volume 2 are packed with help to craft powerful conflict that will strengthen and support character arc. The Character Builder Tool will take all your character-building information and create a character arc blueprint for you.

You can fix a flat character. It’s worth the effort because once readers bind themselves emotionally to a character, they’re hooked. If you’re lucky, they’ll enjoy your characters so much they’ll seek out your next book, too!

READ NEXT: How to Write a Protagonist with True Depth

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post How to Avoid Flat Characters in Your Story appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Every genre and medium of storytelling uses tropes—common themes or story devices. However, the frequency of certain storytelling ideas, such as “the chosen one,” makes them so common that readers get sick of them, and every type of trope can seem cliché or predictable.

Yet tropes are so common that we can’t avoid using them, so it’s better if we can learn how to benefit from them. How can we avoid the problems of tropes and instead use them to help strengthen our story?

Wait, Why Can’t We Just Avoid Tropes?

Think of story tropes as a storytelling pattern. Some patterns are big and can encompass the entire story (coming of age), and some patterns are smaller and play out over a scene or two (a double cross).

These storytelling patterns, or tropes, can focus on:

• characters (hero’s journey, unlikely allies, unreliable narrator, reluctant hero, etc.)
• settings (going into a dark basement, vaguely European medieval surroundings, etc.)
• plot elements (road trip, love triangle, blackmail, trapped in an elevator, etc.)
• and so on…

Any storytelling idea that’s been used more than once becomes part of a pattern, from “secret admirer” to “cellphone battery is dead.” Virtually every idea, twist, obstacle, etc. falls into a pattern, which means it’s part of a trope.

At this point, even the many ways that authors attempt to subvert a trope have themselves become tropes. Think of a “damsel in distress” trope where the damsel isn’t really in danger at all.

Countless numbers of tropes exist, to the point that a whole website is dedicated to them. In other words, tropes are unavoidable.

How Can We Avoid the Weaknesses of Tropes?

The pattern aspect of tropes is part of what makes a trope a trope. Audiences can fill in the details of a trope without the story having to spell everything out because they recognize the pattern.

Not surprisingly, that pattern recognition can also create the sense of predictability, cliché, and other weaknesses. However, the worst negative effects of tropes occur when we rely on them to carry the work of the story.

Taking some of the bullet points above, here’s what it means to rely on tropes to carry the story:

• For characters, we set up an “unlikely allies” trope, but we don’t develop why these characters are working together despite the unlikeliness.
• For setting, we set up a “vaguely European medieval surroundings” trope, but we don’t develop any unique storytelling or worldbuilding details.
• For plot, we set up a “blackmail” trope, but we don’t develop the stakes and motivations of the parties involved.

In all those cases, the tropes would weaken the story, regardless of the strength of our other story elements, because we’d be relying on the trope formula to do the work. Our lazy writing would expect readers to recognize the trope to the point that we merely kick off the pattern and wait for the formula to do the rest. The story itself is just going through the motions.

How Can Tropes Strengthen Our Story?

Given that inherent pattern recognition and predictability, how can we possibly make tropes strengthen our story?

Tropes and their patterns tap into universal experiences and emotions. Readers recognize and are familiar with the patterns of those experiences and emotions from other stories they’ve been exposed to, even if they’ve never come across them in real life. With that common background, tropes can help readers instantly grasp complex relationships, emotional flips, and storytelling turns.

So while tropes can be shortcuts to lazy writing, their patterns and expectations can also be shortcuts to relatability and understanding for readers. As long as we’re then building on those shortcuts rather than expecting them to do all the work, our story will be stronger. In other words, rather than relying on tropes to the extent of shortchanging unique details or character/story development, we can use tropes to improve readers’ connection and provide opportunities for deeper development.

Example: How Tropes Can Strengthen Our Story

Let’s say we want readers to feel more connected to a minor character. Here’s one way we can use tropes to shortcut a starting point for the character’s development (which we then build on) and strengthen the character’s connection to readers:

1. Recognize what tropes/patterns the character represents: The character is an intelligent precocious child, and thus readers will expect a know-it-all who’s always a step ahead of everyone else.
2. Lean into the trope in a way that adds relatability: Make the child more relatable by showing them as an outsider or dismissed in some respects.
3. Recognize the trope’s expectations (and common subversions): Readers will believe that when cornered by the bad guy, the child will come out on top.
4. Subvert the trope in a way that adds opportunities for depth: Instead, the child doesn’t realize the bad guy is manipulating them, because…they are still a child. (Note: Sometimes this step isn’t even on the page because the opportunity is what’s important, not the subversion.)
5. Use the opportunity to add character and/or story development: In the reveal of the child being manipulated instead, use the opportunity to deepen their character development, such as by exploring their feelings of outsider-ness or being dismissed, or maybe their precociousness is a result of feeling like they’re not allowed to make mistakes, and this was a big mistake.

In this example, between the child being a victim of the bad guy’s manipulation and deepening their character development on the page, readers will feel doubly sorry for them and thus more emotionally connected to them. As a result, the story will feel deeper and stronger.

Focus on the Opportunity for More, Not the Subversion

There are plenty of advice articles out there about how to twist or subvert a trope:

• Change the context
• Gender/role reversal
• Layer tropes to come up with something unique, etc.

That advice can be great and good to know, and in fact, I’ve written one of those posts. But like mentioned above, many subversions have now become new tropes.

So if we can’t avoid using tropes, and if there’s a limit to how much we can subvert tropes, how can we make them benefit our story? Strengthening our story with — or despite — tropes is less about the specifics of subverting them and more about how we can take something potentially cliché and use it to add depth and development to our story.

We can use the shortcuts that tropes provide to give us a quick starting point to build on for more depth in our story. We can use the shorthand of trope relatability to give us room to focus on development beyond or outside of the trope.

In other words, rather than spending our time trying to think of a never-before-thought-of twist for our story’s tropes, we may be better off to accept that tropes aren’t bad—but they are just a starting point. If we instead spend our time using our story’s tropes as a launchpad for adding uniqueness and depth, our story will be stronger. *smile*

Have you struggled to understand tropes before or been stumped for how to twist the tropes in your story? Does this post help you see how embracing them as shortcuts might allow us to add more depth in other ways? Do you have any questions about tropes or their weakness and how to use them?

Check out the Character Type and Trope Thesaurus.

Use this resource to familiarize yourself with the commonalities for a certain kind of character while also exploring ways to elevate them and make them memorable, more interesting, and perfectly suited for the story you want to tell.

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

The post How to Strengthen Our Story with Tropes appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

The single tear trickling down the cheek.

A kiss that leaves one’s knees weak.

The grin that stretches from ear to ear.

Yawn

Oh, excuse me. I almost fell asleep there.

Why Readers Hate Clichéd Emotional Responses

Clichés in writing are frowned upon because they’re easy; they’re the sign of a writer who chooses to go with the first idea that comes to mind rather than digging deeper to find the exact phrase to suit the character and scene. They don’t contribute to a unique authorial voice or say anything about who the character is as an individual. Clichéd emotional responses are particularly yawn-worthy because they literally could apply to anyone.

Readers come to each story with different purposes—to be entertained, informed, or to escape the real world, just to name a few. But regardless of why they open up a book, they all have something in common: readers all want to be engaged, to lose themselves in the story world. And the best way to make that happen is to get them feeling as they’re reading.

Consider the stories you’ve read that were thoroughly engrossing, that you couldn’t put down. My bet is that your emotions were engaged along with the character’s. When she was in danger, your own heartbeat increased. When she experienced insecurity, you felt that twinge of uncertainty in your gut. Your spirits lightened just a bit at the moment of revelation, when she finally recognized the changes she had to make to achieve her goal.

When our character’s feelings are clear and logical, they trigger the reader’s emotions, making it harder for them to put the book down. Character emotion is, in my opinion, the most effective and longest lasting hook in our bag of tricks, so it’s imperative that we get it right in our stories. And clichés that we’ve seen a million times or overuse in our own writing just don’t get the job done.

Each character, like each person, is unique, so their emotional responses should make sense for them individually. Here’s how you can make sure that happens in your story.

Study People

Emotional clichés are common because we’re so familiar with them; we’ve seen and heard them a million times. To move past them and expand your emotional vocabulary, you just need more ideas for how various feelings can be expressed. This is why Angela and I started The Emotion Thesaurus, so we’d have more ideas to fall back on. Here are some of our favorite ways to gather that emotional data.

Watch Other People. What do the kids at the park do when they’re excited? What’s happening to that woman’s body when she’s annoyed? What’s going on with her face, her hands, her shoulders, her posture? Watching others can be tricky because you don’t want to be creepy about it. But good writers are often a little nosy. Hone those observation skills and notice what happens with other people when they’re experiencing certain emotions.

Better yet, Start with Yourself. Think about what physically happens when an emotion comes on. Take note specifically of the internal reactions, since you can’t study those in other people. What’s happening in your gut, in your muscles, to your pulse and breathing? Where does your mind go?

Analyze Books and Movies. Actors have to convey a character’s emotions believably; it’s what they get paid to do. So movies and TV shows can be a great resource. They’re also easy because we can rewind them or pause to make notes. Yes, literal notes. When you’re watching a movie or reading a book and you see emotions being conveyed uniquely, get out the notepad or laptop and write those examples down. Then you can examine them later to see how the author or actor was able to express the emotion so clearly.

Studying the emotional reactions of others will give you more ideas so you won’t have to rely on the ones you tend to overuse. Then, when you’ve got a good list of brainstorming options, make your character’s response realistic by individualizing it. To do that, you’ll need to know a few things about him or her.

Know Your Character

Personality plays a huge part in how someone conveys emotion. A flamboyant person is going to respond differently than someone who is timid. Likewise, someone who is easygoing will have different reactions than a high-strung character. So it’s important to identify your character’s dominant traits, since they will dictate many of their emotional responses. For help identifying those, check out our downloadable Character Pyramid and Character Attribute Target Resource from our Tools and Worksheets page.

Another factor that plays into this has to do with emotional range. Picture it as a straight line, with RESERVED on one end and DEMONSTRATIVE on the other. On a normal day, when it comes to emotional responses, where does your character fall on this spectrum? Is she pegged at one end? Right in the middle? Leaning toward one side or the other?

The answer to this question will provide you with a baseline for how your character will react so you can write her consistently, enabling readers to become familiar with her responses. That baseline will also help readers see when something is “off”—say, if the character is hiding her true feelings, or when she has a big, overblown reaction to something trivial. Unexpected responses will act like red flags, letting the reader know that something important is going on and they need to pay attention.

A third thing you want to figure out for your character is whether she tends to fight, flee, or freeze in times of stress. These are the common psychological responses to real or perceived threats. Characters often feel vulnerable when their feelings are triggered, and their natural tendency in this area will determine their emotional response to some stimuli.

Use Dialogue

Every character talks and interacts with others in their own way. Volume, tone, timbre, speech patterns, dialect, word choices, and other elements will be specific to him or her. Nonverbal habits will be present as well, since body language always plays a part in our conversations. But these verbal and physical cues will shift with the character’s emotions. When it comes to dialogue, think about how her voice and speech will change when she’s angry, excited, or sad. Make note of those differences and apply them when the specific feeling hits, and the reader will be able to easily track the character’s emotions throughout the story.

To bring it all together, let’s take one situation and show how different characters might respond. Let’s say we have a teen-aged heroine who is being confronted with a subject she’d rather avoid. Below is Character A’s profile, followed by her personalized response to this scenario.

Character A: Dionne
Personality: Respectful, cautious, sneaky
Emotional Range: Reserved
Fight-Flight-Freeze Response: Flight
Emotional Dialogue Cues: Speech gets short and clipped; fidgety hands; doesn’t meet people’s gaze

“So how’d the party go?”

Dionne plastered on a smile and buried herself in her Instagram feed. “Great.”

“See, I knew you’d have a good time. Who was there?”

Her mouth went dry, but she didn’t dare swallow, not with Dad watching her over his coffee mug. Despite the hour, his eyes were bright and searching, twin spotlights carving through the mocha-infused fog.

She shrugged. “The usual.” Nothing to see here. Move along.

“What about Trey? I ran into his mom at the office yesterday and she said he was going.”

“Um, yeah. He was there.” She scrolled quicker, the images blurring by.

“He sounds like a good kid. Maybe we could have him and his mom over for dinner.”

Her stomach lurched. “Oh, I don’t know.” Her phone trembled and she abandoned it, sitting on her hands to keep them still. “We don’t really hang with the same crowd.”

Dad grabbed an apple from the bowl. “Couldn’t hurt to branch out and get to know some new people.” He slid into the chair across from her.

She stood up on legs that didn’t quite want to support her. “Shoot, I just remembered. I have to finish my history paper. See you tonight?”

Halfway up the stairs, Dionne blew out a shaky breath. How could her dad be so smart at work and so stupid about people?

We see here how Dionne’s personality, emotional range, flight response, and dialogue habits all work together to paint a realistic response to a difficult situation. Now let’s look at the same scenario, but with a different character.

***

Character B: Beth
Personality: Bold, confrontational, impulsive
Emotional Range: More demonstrative than reserved
Fight-Flight-Freeze Response: Fight
Emotional Dialogue Cues: interrupts people; volume rises; defensive physical cues

“So how’d the party go?” Dad asked, sliding into a chair at the table.

Beth looked up from her phone, her heart rate kicking up a notch. “Fine.”

“See, I knew you’d have a good time. Who was there?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sarah, Allegra, Jordan—you know, the usual.”

“What about Trey? I ran into his mom at the office yesterday and she said he was going.”

“I don’t know.” She got up to dump her dishes in the sink, then leaned against the counter, arms crossed. “Maybe? There were a lot of people there.”

Dad grabbed an apple from the bowl. “He sounds like a good kid. Maybe we could have him and his mom over—”

“Jeez, Dad!” He quirked an eyebrow, so she lowered her voice even though she totally wasn’t yelling. “Stop pushing. He’s not my type.”

“How do you know?” He rubbed at a bruised spot on his apple. “Couldn’t hurt to branch out—”

“He’s not my type, okay?” She barked out a laugh. “I literally could NOT be less interested.” Especially after last night.

He stared at her, so she glared back at him until he sighed and held up his hands in surrender. “Point taken. I won’t bring it up again.” He kissed her on the top of the head on his way out. “See you tonight.”

He was halfway up the stairs before Beth blew out a shaky breath. How could her dad be so smart at work and so stupid about people?

***

Same situation. Two different reactions. This is how you take your character’s emotional responses to the next level. By spending a little extra time on the front end to get to know who your character is, it’s much easier to personalize their reactions. The end result will be characters that ring true for readers, who are then willing to participate in an emotional journey that carries them further into your story.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post How to Avoid Clichéd Emotional Reactions appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

What are writers chronically short on? Time.

There never seems to be enough of it as we try to get the next book written, research our publishing options, keep up with marketing, work on our platform, etc., and that doesn’t even factor in what’s happening in other areas of our life. And as we juggle, the one thing that can help us succeed more than anything else is often neglected: education to help us improve our storytelling skills.

Introducing Mini-Lessons

You guys know Becca and I have a lot to say about description and how showing the right things in the right way means readers are pulled in and will care deeply about characters and what’s happening in their lives. We’ve written books on many description elements and have even more of these in our THESAURUS database at One Stop for Writers.

This summer, Becca and I have recorded a mini lesson for each of our thesauruses, helping you better understand that story element, what its superpower is in your story, and how to activate that detail through description.

Each video takes you through a thesaurus in the One Stop for Writers database, but you don’t need to be a subscriber to benefit from these lessons or use our thesauruses (although they are very helpful for brainstorming). But if you are someone who uses them, this will broaden your understanding so you get even more value from each brainstorming list.

Bite-sized learning is a perfect match for busy writers

Life can be hectic, making it hard to carve out big blocks of time for learning. With these videos, you need about 5 (ish) minutes. Totally doable! Whether you want to learn how to describe a character’s emotions, activate the power of your scene’s setting, or understand character motivation better so plotting becomes easier, a helpful mini-lesson is waiting for you.

Here’s the playlist, or choose the topic you’d like to know more about below.

Happy writing and learning!

Grow Your Skills with Becca & Angela

How to Describe a Character’s Appearance

How Emotional Trauma Affects Characters & Their Arc

How to Use a Character’s Fears in Storytelling

How to Create a Character Readers Will Love

How to Give a Character Flaws that Will Hold Them Back

How the Right Setting Details Make a Scene More Powerful

How to Create a Memorable Character Using a Talent or Skill

How to Show What Your Character Is Feeling

How to Use Conflict to Power up Your Story

How to Write Your Theme and Use Effective Symbolism in Fiction

How to Use the Weather to Build Mood and Generate Conflict

How to Find the Right Job for a Character

How to Bring Readers Into a Story Using Textures

How to Create Vivid Description Using Colors and Patterns

How Describing an Object’s Shape the Right Way Strengthens the Story

How to Build Strong Characters & Arcs

How to Amplify Your Character’s Emotional State

Need more help as you plan, write, and revise? Join us at One Stop!

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Improve Your Storytelling in 5 Minutes appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

I’m talking about using archetypes and tropes — characters who play a specific role in a story or who have a blend of characteristics that make them instantly recognizable: the Rebel, the Bully, the Hot Billionaire, the Chosen One…you get the idea. Readers recognize these types of characters and may even expect to find them in certain stories.

So, our job is done, right? Pick an archetype or trope, put some clothes on them and shove them into the story. No, ‘fraid not. Character types and tropes can provide a skeleton, but to avoid a stock character or overdone cliché, they must stand on their own and mesmerize by being unique.

And that’s where this thesaurus comes in.

Characters need layers, full stop, so trope or not, we want to dig for what makes them an individual, give them a soul, and make adaptations that will challenge a reader’s expectations.

What this thesaurus will cover:

A Trope or Type Description and Fictional Examples. Before we can think about how to adapt a trope, we need to know more about who they are. This overview and examples will help you know if this baseline character is right for your story.

Common Strengths and Weaknesses. A character who aligns with a trope or type tends to have certain positive and negative traits, so we list those as a starting point. But don’t be afraid to branch out – personality is a great place to break the mold.

Associated Actions, Behaviors, and Tendencies. Because tropes have a mix of traits, qualities, and a worldview baked in, you’ll need to know how to write their actions, choices, priorities, and certain tendencies…so you can then decide how to break with tradition.

Situations that Will Challenge Them. Every character faces challenges in a story that are extra difficult because of who they are, what they believe, fear, and need. A trope or type character is no different. We’ll cue up ideas to get your brains whizzing on what this can look like in your story.

Twist This Type With a Character Who… is where we give you ideas on how to break expectations, so you deliver someone who has fresh angles, and isn’t a typical stand-in.

Clichés to Avoid is where we alert you to some of the overdone versions of a type or trope so you’re aware of them as you develop your characters and plot your story.

Readers are hardwired to look for patterns and familiarity

Which is why we see tropes used so often, but good storytellers know that in 99% of cases, using one is the starting point only. We want rounded and dynamic characters, not flat ones. So, unless you require a stock character to fill a background role, any character who starts as a trope should be as carefully developed as those who did not. Readers want–and deserve!–fresh characters, so dig into those inner layers and bring forth someone unique.

Join us each Saturday for a new entry, and if there’s a character type or trope you’d like us to cover, add it in the comments here, and we’ll add it to the list of potentials!

Here are all the types and tropes we’ve covered so far.

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Introducing…The Character Type & Trope Thesaurus! appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

What now? you say. How is that possible? He (or she) is the baddie, after all!

Indeed. And we know it. But just like a protagonist, the antagonist can have something special about them too. It’s not a hollow quirk, catch-phrase, or great sense of style that draws us in. No, it’s something deeper, something attached to their identity or life experience. We see this part of them and relate to it because it reminds us of something we’ve seen or experienced in our own real-world journey.

Is relatability only for protagonists?

A lot of airtime is devoted to building a relatable protagonist because it makes the character accessible to readers in a meaningful way. Relatability is a rope that ties the two together – in some significant way, readers see the hero or heroine is like them. Maybe they’ve both felt the same thing, been in the same situation, experienced the same heartache or sting of failure. This common ground helps a bond of understanding and empathy to form, and the reader becomes invested in what happens to the character. They root for the protagonist and care what happens to them.

We don’t see as much written on the subject of relatability when it comes to the antagonist or villain because writers are supposed to nudge the reader into the protagonist’s camp, not the antagonist’s. Unfortunately, though, this can send the wrong message about the importance of our darker characters, leading to some writers glossing over their development so they end up with cliché, yawn-worthy villains.

Antagonists should be as developed as protagonists.

They should have understandable motivations (for them), have a history that shows what led them down the dark alley of life, and an identity, personality, and qualities that make them a tough adversary for the protagonist to beat. The more dedicated, skilled, and motivated the antagonist is, the more of a challenge they will be, leading to great friction, tension, clashes, and conflict.

So, just as we want to show readers a protagonist’s inner layers and give them ways to connect and care about the protagonist, we should encourage readers to find something good or relatable about the antagonist so it causes the reader to be conflicted. They may not agree with the antagonists’ goal or how they go about getting it, but maybe they understand why this story baddie wants what they want, or they admire certain qualities they have.

When readers are torn over how to feel, they become more invested in the story.

Life is not always black and white, is it? So it’s okay if a tug of war goes on inside them over who is right and who is wrong in the story, or if they care enough about the villain to hope they will choose to turn from their dark path, and redemption may be possible.

So how do we make an antagonist relatable?

Common human experiences, especially ones that encourage moral confliction, are a great way to show readers they have something in common with the antagonist. For example, consider temptation.

Haven’t you ever been tempted to cross a moral line?
Did you ever want to make someone pay because they deserved it?
Have you ever ignored society’s rules because they don’t make sense, are unfair, or were built to benefit a select few?

Temptation is something we’ve all felt, and wrestle with. Sometimes we remain steadfast, other times we give in. So having a darker character be tempted in a way readers relate to will cause them to identify with the antagonist’s mindset.

Another way to use temptation is to get readers to imagine the what if, which can be another area of common ground:

• What if you could easily let go of guilt and do what feels right for you?
• What if you could break the law for the right reasons and serve a greater good?
• What if you could go back in time and erase someone who really deserves to be erased?

This can work well if you tie the antagonist’s desire to embrace the dark side because of a past trauma. For example…

• Maybe they do whatever feels right because they were enslaved by a cruel master as a child
• They break the law because those who make them are corrupt and entitled
• They go back and erase someone because that person killed their beloved and unborn child

Can’t we all relate to these dark motivations just a little? Don’t they help us understand where the character’s behavior is coming from? We may not morally agree with what the antagonist does, but we do feel some connection to them.

And I’m convinced this last one is the key because antagonists and villains have an Achilles heel: their role. As soon as it’s clear they are cast as the Bad Guy or Gal, readers put them in a box. They must be a jerk, a sore loser, a narcissist, someone who’s all about power and control. They must be unlikable.

And I don’t know about you, but when the antagonist or villain turns out to be exactly those things, I’m disappointed. Why? Because it’s expected: good guy faces off against typical bad guy, good guy wins. Yawn.

Relatability makes it okay to like the antagonist, even though they do bad things.

So, to recap and offer a few more ideas…

Craft a backstory that’s as well-drawn as the Protagonist’s. As the author, you need to know why they’re messed up and take the dark path. Use a past tragedy to help readers understand what led them to their role. Maybe you can even reveal this in a way that causes readers to wonder if they would be any different had they been in the antagonist’s shoes. 

Give them a credible, understandable motivation. Even if their goal is a destructive one, they should have a good reason for wanting it. (For ideas on what this could look like, check out the Dark Motivations in this database.)

Give them a talent, something helpful or interesting. Just like a protagonist, your antagonist likely is skilled in some way. What talent or skill will help them achieve their goal? And you can always make this an interesting dichotomy, like an antagonist with a talent for healing who takes in hurt animals but lacks the same empathy for humans. 

Give them a quality or trait that is undeniably admirable. It’s easy to paint a villain as being all bad, so skip the cliché and give them a belief they live by. Maybe they keep every promise or hold honestly in the highest regard and so are always truthful, even if it makes them look bad. Of course, the dark side might be that they don’t suffer lies of any kind, and punish them severely.

Make them human. Sometimes writers can go on a “power and glory” tear and forget their antagonist is as prone to “Average Joe” problems as anyone else. Does their roof leak, do they have visitors show up at an inconvenient time, do they get sick?

Antagonists can have a hobby or secret, struggle over what to do, or regret words said in haste just like the rest of us. So while you highlight their dark ways and volatile emotions, remember to also show how in some ways, they’re just like anyone else.

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Writing Antagonists Readers Can’t Help But Like appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

How characters look is a much-discussed element of writing craft. So, just how much do we need to describe our character’s appearance?

Obviously individual writers’ mileage may vary on this question. Some authors may spend a lot of time on character appearance. Others may do it more intuitively, or leave it almost entirely up to the reader’s imagination.

Coming from a screenwriting background, character appearance is a hot topic with my ‘Bang2writers’ because of casting. The ‘right’ actor for a character may refer to personality, but also appearance. For example, a LOT of people felt Tom Cruise was entirely the wrong choice for Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character!

With this background in mind then, I am going to offer up my top tips on character appearance in your novel. Ready? Let’s go …

1. Beware of ‘Laundry List’ Character Introductions

Character introductions are super-important. The first time we ‘see’ them, we should get a feel for WHO they are via WHAT they are doing.

In screenwriting, we say ‘characters are what they DO’ … but too often, writers introduce their characters just by what they’re wearing. I call this the ‘laundry list’ character introduction. Yet all of us know ‘clothes DON’T make the wo/man’!

Sometimes it won’t be clothes. Instead it may also be the way they wear their hair, how they do their make up or whether they have certain physical attributes. (For example, whether the character has big breasts … Yes, you’ve guessed it, female characters fare worst in this).

Yes, what we choose to wear CAN reflect our attitudes (especially strong looks like punk or hippy). But the fact is too many writers use this as a lazy shortcut **on its own**.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Avoid the ‘laundry list’ introduction. If you want to use clothes go ahead … just don’t rely on them to define the character.

2. Avoid non-stop moving body parts!

So if characters are what they DO, then we should rely on action when thinking about appearance. This Physical Feature Descriptive Database at One Stop for Writers offers some good hints for describing things like a characters’ lips and what they may do to signify different emotions.

However, we’re not out of the woods yet!

Whilst characters physically moving *can* be a good indicator of what they’re going through, we don’t want to rely on it too much either.

When it comes to novel writing, the psychological aspect is very important. If we reduce every character to what they’re physically doing all the time, it can adversely affect the read. Instead of an emotional connection, the reader becomes a voyeur.

This is most obvious when authors write constant actions pertaining to the body, such as …

• Eyebrows rising
• Hands on / off hips
• Nodding / shaking of head
• Smiling / grimacing
• Licking of lips
• Hands in the air or similar gestures

In other words, constant moving body parts become a ‘filler’ or worse, a stand in for actual characterization. No thanks!

KEY TAKEAWAY: Avoid your characters’ movements becoming ‘filler’ by taking the emphasis off their ‘smaller’ actions. Use them in moderation instead.

3. Beware the WORD OF DOOM

There’s one word I see too often when I read female character introductions. Guess what it is …

… BEAUTIFUL!

I call this the ‘word of doom’. (BTW, we may also see other variants of this word too, ranging from ‘pretty’ to ‘sexy’, so nice try but no cigar!).

I’m not alone, either. Check out what this A List actor has to say on the matter.

In fact, the word of doom pops up in the screenwriting world so often there are whole websites devoted to terrible casting calls, such as Miss L’s brilliant but scathing Casting Call Woe over on Tumblr. Here’s another called @femscriptintros.

Authors are not off the hook either. In recent years more and more readers have been calling out novelists for objectifying female characters like this.

Confused?? After all, ‘beautiful’ is a compliment, right?

Well, think on it this way. Female characters are often described by HOW THEY LOOK *over* WHAT THEY DO.

Yet if characters are supposed to be what they do, their behaviour is supposed to be what drives them, not how good-looking their appearance is.

Remember, a male lead might often be good-looking too, but they’re still more likely to be introduced by their character traits, than how they look. Gnash!

KEY TAKEAWAY: Avoid falling back on the ‘word of doom’ when introducing female characters. Instead of focusing on their appearance, think about their internal character traits and behaviour. Personality before gender (this works for all characters, by the way).

Good Luck!

LUCY V. HAY - Resident Writing Coach

Lucy V. Hay is a script editor, author and blogger who helps writers. She’s been the script editor and advisor on numerous UK features and shorts & has also been a script reader for 20 years, providing coverage for indie prodcos, investors, screen agencies, producers, directors and individual writers. She’s also an author, publishing as both LV Hay and Lizzie Fry.  Lizzie’s latest, a serial killer thriller titled The Good Mother is out now with Joffe Books, with her sixth thriller out in 2024. Lucy’s site at www.bang2write.com has appeared in Top 100 round-ups for Writer’s Digest & The Write Life, as well as a UK Blog Awards Finalist and Feedspot’s #1 Screenwriting blog in the UK (ninth in the world.). She is also the author of the bestselling non-fiction book, Writing & Selling Thriller Screenplays: From TV Pilot To Feature Film (Creative Essentials), which she updated for the streaming age for its tenth anniversary in 2023.

The post How Much Do I Need To Describe My Character’s Appearance? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, and professional speaker. She writes educational nonfiction books for writers and fantasy books for both Young Adult and adult audiences. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England, with her wife and son.

Take it away, Sacha…

Everybody loves their heroes, some people even love their villains. But it’s a rare author that actively loves and spends equal time on their side characters. Sure, some of them are fun to write, but they’re not who the story is about, which is why so many of them are simply slapped on and ill-thought out. Today, I’m going to help you combat that by giving you three mistakes to avoid when creating your side characters. 

Mistake 1 — Weighing Side Characters Incorrectly

Not all side characters are created equal. While some craft teachers talk about archetypes, I prefer to look at side characters in terms of their effect and influence on the story. 

Here are the three main types of side characters:

• Cameos are brief and fleeting, usually nameless or with a generic label “guard, receptionist, girl with the teddy”. They leave no mark on the story and are forgettable. Think the woman in the red dress in the Matrix, or Marvel comic writer Stan Lee’s appearances in the Marvel films.
• Minor characters are still fleeting, they still don’t leave much of a mark on the story save for transactional exchanges like a barman or a shop owner. Think Mr. Filch in Harry Potter.
• Major characters are usually scarce, only a handful of them in most stories. They have their own subplots and character arcs, they should represent the book’s theme too. Think Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter.

Too often, writers try to give minor characters character arcs, or they don’t give enough attention to a character that’s supposed to have an arc or subplot. Understanding the different types of side characters should enable you to give the right amount of page time and depth to each character.

Mistake 2 — Thinking You Need Comprehensive Character Arcs

Character arcs are easy for protagonists, you get the entire book to explore it. But side characters don’t get as much page time as protagonists. So how do you show the depth of arc you need without the side character taking over?

Well, you can’t. At least, not exactly anyway.

What you can do is create the illusion of an arc.

You’ll need to show the “what” of what they want (and the fact they don’t have it) at the start of the story. For example, early on in the Harry Potter series, we see Hermione wanting to be academically brilliant and pass all her exams. After that, you need to show a struggle to achieve the goal somewhere in the middle of your story. And, if we’re talking Harry Potter, then Hermione gets her own subplot devoted to this where she uses the Time-Turner to take more lessons than is scientifically possible. Near the end of your book, you’ll have to show the resolution i.e., Hermione passes all her exams and does well, or by the end of the series she realizes it’s not really as important as she once thought.

The beauty of a side character arc is that you can flex it up and down. Want to show a little more depth? Add another scene or two with the character grappling to change. Need to cut down your word count? Then reduce the number of scenes focusing on side character arcs.

The trick to making a side character arc work well is to connect it to the protagonist and, if possible, the theme. In Hermione’s case, her academic brilliance both impedes her friendships with Ron and Harry but also helps them at various points when she has useful bits of information about spells or wizardry.

Mistake 3 — Not Having a Reason for Existing Outside the Protagonist

To create more depth in your side characters and to make them seem realistic, use the three “whys” method.

Each side character should have:

·       A protagonist why

·       A life why

·       A scene why

The Protagonist Why

Even though you want your side characters to look like they’re full and comprehensive, ultimately, in story terms, they exist to either help or hinder your protagonist. That’s their “protagonist why”. Are they in the story to make the protagonist stop and think? To help them reflect? To protect them? Teach them? Or perhaps put obstacles and barriers in their way? You need to know what their “protagonist why” is.

The Life Why

Protagonist aside, to help create the illusion of depth, your major side characters should have something they want outside the protagonist. Do they need to come out to their family? Are they trying to get a big important job? Maybe they want to win an award. Whatever their own “life why,” if you can make it serve the story by reflecting the theme or perhaps allowing the side character’s goal to interfere with the protagonist’s all the better. For example, in the above Harry Potter example, Hermione’s “life why” is to do well academically. It interferes with her friendships in both positive and negative ways. 

Scene Why

Have you ever read a scene where half a dozen characters enter, two or three of them have a conversation, and then all six leave again? I can’t tell you the number of manuscripts I’ve read where that happens. When you have a group of characters in a scene, each character must do one or all of the following:

• Do something
• Say something
• Bring information 
• Cause a problem
• Or fix a problem

I’m sure there are other things a character could do in a scene, but the point is, they must be doing something. If they’re not engaged in dialogue, tension creation, tension easing, or action of some kind, then they’re surplus to requirements and need to be removed. Too many instances of “surplus to requirements” and you have to question whether you need the character at all.  

If you can avoid these three mistakes you will craft stronger characters. Knowing the importance of a cameo versus a major character will help you manage your cast more effectively, focusing on those characters that need the attention for the sake of your story. Remember, with side characters, it’s only the illusion of an arc you’re creating, not a comprehensive one like a protagonist. Last, try to ensure each major side character has three “whys”. Do those things and you’ll avoid the most commonly occurring mistakes with side characters and build better stories.

If you enjoyed these tips, then you can find out more about building better side characters in Sacha Black’s latest craft book for writers: 8 Steps to Side Characters: How to Craft Supporting Roles with Intention, Purpose and Power.

Guest Contributor

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Context is often an underappreciated element of our writing because when not done well, a context-filled passage can become a tell-not-show info dump. However, context is essential for most aspects of writing, from attributing dialogue and establishing stakes to evoking emotions and anchoring readers within a setting.

For that last situation, without context to “set the scene,” readers can struggle to visualize and fully immerse themselves in our stories. So let’s dig into this idea: How can we set the scene throughout our story and avoid common problems?

What Is the “Talking Head” Problem?

For many writers, dialogue is the easiest story element to write. In fact, some first drafts include only dialogue, saving the step to layer in other elements: setting and description, action, internal thoughts, emotions, etc. for later drafts.

Without the context of those additional layers—especially those that ground characters (and readers) in the scene—dialogue is like an audio play, making the story follow a couple of talking heads floating in an empty space. To avoid that problem, writers often fall back on two techniques that don’t necessarily help our story:

• One common quick fix allows us to attribute dialogue but doesn’t solve the talking-head problem—and creates a lot of empty, clichéd phrases:
  • She nodded.
  • He smiled.
  • She frowned.
• Another common fix addresses the talking-head issue but can also result in overwriting with too many details that don’t add to our story:
  • She slid her finger around the rim of her coffee cup and then picked up the mug from the table.
  • He sat back on his chair and crossed his ankle over his other knee.
  • She shifted her weight and leaned against the wall.

What’s a better solution? Include details that set the scene—fixing the talking-head problem—and that add meaning to our story.

How Can We Make Context Meaningful?

Sure, we could avoid the talking-head issue by simply choosing random ways for our characters to interact with their environment: touching, pushing, pulling, opening, closing, eating, drinking, etc. But those random, empty interactions will drag down our story’s pace, feel contrived, and not add meaningful layers of context to our story. How can we ensure our contextual details are meaningful?

Details are meaningful when they add something to our story.

Strong description provides context for…

• a character’s emotional state and/or emotional struggle
• a character’s thought process and/or their priorities
• foreshadowing a future meaningful detail
• highlighting an important setting detail
• exposing a point of conflict
• reinforcing stakes or motivation
• setting up a future plot point
• and so on.

Start by thinking of a character’s environment from their emotional perspective: What’s their situation and how do they feel about it? What interactions can express that?

• a chilled character cradling a warm beverage
• an upset character pounding a table with each argument
• a nervous character hugging a pillow

Also think about what we want readers to understand from the story: Which details matter (or will matter) to the story? What interactions can highlight where we want readers’ attention?

• a character fiddling with a necklace later revealed as important
• a character dropping things that create later issues
• a character leaving a door open to later cause a scene

What Do Meaningful Details Look Like?

Those examples in the second common fix shared up top could work for grounding readers in the setting and scene of our story if they were meaningful details. For instance, let’s expand on the first example:

“Ma’am, do you know where your ex-husband is?”
Sally slid her finger around the rim of the coffee cup. Should she tell the cop Bob had just been here, drinking coffee from this very mug?
She picked up the cup from the table and dropped it into the sink, along with all the other dirty dishes that seemed to pile up whenever her too-tempting-for-his-own-good ex was in town. “No, officer, I haven’t been in contact with him.”

Now those contextual setting details add layers and subtext to the dialogue. Her touching the rim could reflect her internal debate and/or attempt to ruin DNA evidence, etc. Her picking up the cup reveals her decision in the debate by preventing the cop from discovering the evidence, while the rest of the sentence hints at more of her internal conflict.

The actions that set the scene, giving readers a visual way to imagine the setting, now add meaning to the exchange. They’re not just random actions thrown in to tell readers these characters aren’t floating in empty space. There’s a reason for her actions that add layers to the storytelling.

Limit Reliance on the Quick & Easy Approach

All that said, our story is likely to include some quick-and-easy “she nodded” or basic “he sat on the couch” type of sentences. The point is not that we shouldn’t ever use them in our writing, but that we shouldn’t rely on them too often, especially as we edit our story beyond the first draft.

Instead, when setting the scene and grounding our characters (and readers), we should look for actions and details that add layers of meaning to our story to strengthen and richen our storytelling. *smile* Do you have any questions or insights about how to set the scene in meaningful ways for our characters?

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

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We’ve all read stories where our breath slows, the world falls away, and the page disappears. We’re somewhere else, a place that isn’t real, yet is. We’re with people who don’t exist, yet somehow do. We see what they see. Feel what they feel. We are in the moment, captive, compelled, not just reading words, but living them.

When we come up for air, as writers, we sort of sag in place, awed by the power the author had over us. It’s beautiful and enviable, this story sorcery. We want it for ourselves, of course. Thankfully, we know what it is. We even have a name for it: emotion.

Emotion is the bridge between characters and readers.

It’s what draws the latter out of the real world and into the fictional one. And above all else, emotion is the one thing storytellers MUST get right.

We know how important emotion is to story, and we want to write it in a way that grips readers, whether it’s rage or fear, amusement or curiosity. Our universal goal is to show the character’s feelings in a way that rings true – readers recognize the emotion, connect with it, and share this emotional moment with the character in a way that’s meaningful.

It’s a tall order, especially when we feel like all our characters tend to express emotions in the same way. You know, the smiles, frowns, and smirks. The racing heartbeats. The shuddery breaths.

(Did you wince a little? It’s okay. We all have expressions we tend to overuse.)

Becca and I created The Emotion Thesaurus to help writers brainstorm unique ways to show any emotion, but having lists of body language, thoughts, visceral sensations and vocal cues is really just the starting gate. Each idea we provide needs to be tailored to a character for it to become an authentic portrayal of their most honest feelings.

And here lies the biggest reason why emotion fails to draw readers in: the writer hasn’t gotten to know their character well enough to create tailored responses.

Each Character Is Unique…Their Emotional Responses Will Be, Too

We are all individuals, right? What makes us anxious, happy, jealous, etc. may be different, but even if an event triggered the same emotion for all of us, our reactions would still be unique. Put us both in a hospital waiting room as a loved one undergoes a risky surgery, for example. I might be a pacer, unable to sit still. I might go to the reception counter several times to ask questions they can’t answer, constantly text my family to keep them in the loop, and then discover my phone battery has entered single digits, be unable to control the shrillness of my voice as I beg staff to use a hospital charger. You, on the other hand, might sit and not move, not for hours, frozen in time. Only your fingers are active, mercilessly picking at your cuticles until they bleed, completely unaware of the damage you’re doing to them.

Like us, our characters will have their own way of processing emotion, and to understand what that will look like, we need to know more about who they are.

Know Their Past

The people and situations from a character’s past will influence their behavior and who they ultimately become. A nurturing grandfather may have taught patience and encouraged the character to think things through before making decisions. A high-achieving parent might have instilled the idea that fortune favors the bold, and any action is better than none. Imprints are powerful. Think about who was influential in your character’s life, and how their worldview, beliefs, values (or lack) may have shaped your character.

Know Their Experiences

People have survival instincts, and your character will, too. Hardwired to watch for danger, experience informs your character, helping them spot potential problems as they go through life. Bad experiences may have made your character risk-adverse, and good ones, the opposite. Do you know how past positive and negative interactions steer them now? Do they invest their time, money, and hearts freely…or utterly refuse to?

Know Their Pain

Painful experiences can scar, not only physically but emotionally. The fear of pain is powerful, but the fear of emotional hurt can derail a person’s goals, damage relationships, make them avoid certain things, and leave them unhappy and unfulfilled.

Knowing your character’s emotional wounds will guide you to understanding what emotions they are sensitive to because those feeling bring them back to that past event that cut them deeply. When these emotions are triggered, your character will have a hard time controlling their responses and their behavior will become more volatile. They will become prone to negative coping mechanisms that can damage their life further.

Know Their Personality

Another facet of humanity is our personality. Certain traits, positive and negative, become part of us and help us solve problems, interact with others, and navigate life. Personality traits come with certain behaviors and inclinations, so knowing what these are will really help you line up emotional responses that fit a character’s personality like the proverbial glove.

Know Their Emotional Range

Personality, genetics, experiences, and personal preferences will create an emotional comfort zone of expressiveness. Understanding how a character behaves in everyday situations serves as your ground zero. Are they open and transparent with strangers, or protective of their thoughts and so keep to themselves? Do they talk a lot, or must words be pulled out of them? Do they make big movements, gesture as they speak, tell jokes, and revel in attention? Or do they listen rather than speak, choose stillness, and only shift and fiddle when put on the spot?

Once you get a feel for “typical” behavior it serves as a baseline and you can make sure their actions, choices, and decisions line up with these preferences. The baseline will become part of their emotional range, helping you plan what a typical response will look like vs. an extreme one. In this way, their responses will always ring true to readers!

Peel Back a Character’s Layers & Showing Emotion Gets Easier

Describing emotion in a way that readers will feel something isn’t easy, but it becomes easier when you really know who your character is and what’s steering their emotions. The more you unearth about someone, the more you will intuitively know what their actions, choices, and behaviors will look like, achieving that authenticity that hooks readers. So grab a notebook and start thinking about the things above, or use a tool like the Character Builder to help you.

To get a feel for the range of feelings your character might experience in your story, check out this list of 130 emotions.

Happy writing!

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post How to Write Emotion Well: Know Your Character appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

This idea of turning tired phrases into new and interesting ones has intrigued me for a while—so much so that I have a notebook full of samples I’ve found in various books. When I get stuck trying to describe something in my own writing, I study those passages to see how the author was able to put a new twist on a well-used phrase. As a result, I’ve figured out a couple of tricks for how we can amp up our descriptions for both fiction and nonfiction works.

The beauty of these techniques is that they work for settings, physical features, character emotion—all kinds of descriptions.

1) Ask Questions to Drill Down and Find the Perfect Phrase

Writing is hard work. Sometimes, when we get hung up on a certain passage, it’s easiest to fall back on the phrasings that are most comfortable: butterflies in the stomach, snow that sparkles like diamonds, a peaches-and-cream complexion, etc. To move beyond these clichés, focus on one aspect of the description and experiment with new ways to describe it. Take this sentence, for instance:

Her eyes are like the lit end of a cigarette, burning into me.
~Al Capone Does My Shirts, Gennifer Choldenko

What a great way to express an angry gaze. You can almost imagine the author’s brainstorming process: How do the eyes burn? What do they look like as they’re burning? What description could I use that expresses both the anger in her eyes and the way they make the viewpoint character feel? This is a great example of how a potentially clichéd phrase can be freshened up with a little extra thought and effort.

2) Mix Up The Senses

Oftentimes, our passages fall flat because they’re described with the most obvious senses: objects have visual descriptors, and sounds are given auditory comparisons. But mixing the senses can often create a fuller, more layered description.

Their voices were loud and rough and had the sharp edges of crushed-up beer cans. ~Breadcrumbs, Anne Ursu

Here, two of the senses are employed to show us how the voices sound: auditory (loud and rough) and textural (the sharp edges of beer cans). Mixing the senses not only makes for unexpected descriptions, it’s also a great way to add dimension and draw readers a bit more into the story.

3) Play With New Words

…entwined as if nothing could ever shoehorn them apart.
~Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor

I never would’ve thought to use the word “shoehorn” here. The obvious choice is pry or tear them apart. But obvious choices, over time, lose their impact and end up sounding flat. Taking the time to explore other word choices can result in a phrase that sounds totally different.

…with eyelashes so spiderleg long…
~The Sky Is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson

And don’t underestimate the impact of making up a brand new word. Just be sure that it’s a perfect fit, so it doesn’t read strangely.

4) Add An Element Of Emotion

Descriptions often read a bit boring because they simply show how something looks, or feels, or sounds. They’re one-dimensional. Emotion, on the other hand, is stirring, awakening physical and emotional sensations inside the reader. When we add an element of emotion to a descriptive phrase—especially when the feeling isn’t overtly mentioned—it adds depth, like in the following example:

He’s not the father I need. He’s a faulty operating system, incompatible with my software.
~Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson

There’s no mention of emotion here, but it still comes through because Anderson has used a comparison that expresses disconnectedness and resulting sadness. Readers are smart, and they appreciate subtlety. Choose comparisons that convey the right emotion and it will come through for readers.

Bonus Resource: The Emotion Thesaurus. Use this collection of emotions to exactly identify the feeling you want to highlight so you can infuse it into your passage.

5) Use Unusual Comparisons

Something deep and painful wrenched out of him, like nails splintering wood as they pulled free.
~Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor

This example is one of my all-time favorites because it accomplishes so much. Taylor adequately conveys the character’s emotion through an unusual but perfect comparison: the sound of nails pulling out of a wood plank. We’ve all heard that noise; it makes me wince just thinking about it. Using this sound to describe someone’s pain is so much more effective than claiming that his heart ached or his chest hurt. To create a description that resonates with readers, experiment with different comparisons.

6) Add Personification

Father’s silence is not merely the absence of sound. It’s a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. It twists in your gut like a worm.
~Chime, Franny Billingsley

Here, the author could easily have said that the father was a man prone to awkward silences. Instead, she used personification to bring those silences to life. They don’t merely make others feel uncomfortable; they pinch, and choke, and twist. This gives life to the father’s typically inanimate moodiness, making it much more active and intentional. With the added personification, this example packs a heavy punch.

7) Zoom Out

Writers are creatures of habit; we get used to seeing things a certain way and describing them from that perspective. But if we zoom out and look at the object as a whole, we’re able to see it and describe it differently.

He was handsome in a way that required a bit of work from the viewer.
~Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater

Stiefvater could have focused on the boy’s eyes or musculature or coloring to describe his looks. But by zooming out and viewing him as a whole, she was able to describe him from that vantage point and come up with something new and interesting.

8) Zoom In

This result can also be achieved by zooming in, rather than out:

I’m holding it so tight my pulse punches through my fingernails.
~If You Find Me, Emily Murdoch

Pulse is one of those emotional indicators that we overuse. It’s always pounding, racing, or thundering like a drumbeat. Here, Murdoch uses this internal sensation in a new way by narrowing in on a part of the body not usually associated with the pulse. And it works because at times of high emotion, you can feel the increased pulse throughout the whole body—even in the tips of the fingers. As this example shows, narrowing the lens can be a great way to describe things from a new perspective.

Bonus Resource: The Physical Feature Thesaurus. Expand your description vocabulary by considering body parts that you’ve never thought of before.

9) Use Contrast

The world felt immense, revolving in the universe with small Susannah McKnight clinging to it.
~Steal Away, Jennifer Armstrong

Some of the things we want to describe are just really difficult. Capturing the immensity of anything—an incredibly small object, big feelings, a large-scale setting—sometimes seems beyond our ability to adequately express. The temptation is to stop the pain and just explain to the reader how big or small it is. A much more compelling technique is to use contrast. Compare the thing to its opposite, and you’ll be able to convey meaning without resorting to telling.

Bonus Feature: One Stop for Writers’ Setting Tutorials. Learn about how to employ various technique and devices to enhance your setting descriptions. The list includes instruction on utilizing contrast, light and shadow, symbolism, hyperbole, and more.

10) Characterize

He bristled with latent power as he greeted people with the slippery, handsome accent of old Virginia money.
~Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater

I like this passage because it describes this man using characterization rather than a list of physical features. You don’t have a specific picture of what he looks like, but you have a general idea because you know he’s powerful and wealthy and maybe a little slimy. All of that is enough to paint a mental picture. The next time you struggle with describing a new character, consider introducing him with information other than how he looks. Using his job, character traits, quirks, or his values can have a greater and long-lasting impact on readers than a litany of physical features.

Bonus Resource: The Character Builder at One Stop. Use this tool to get to know your character intimately. This will make it clearer which elements of characterization you’ll want to emphasize with your descriptions.

11) Mix and Match

Moonlight froze the landscape; everything was a ghost of itself.
~Steal Away, Jennifer Armstrong

This setting description combines multiple techniques. The author has zoomed out to envision the landscape as a whole instead of focusing on the minutia. She also added some personification, as if the moon had used its latent powers to purposely freeze the setting. And a beautifully chosen metaphor creates the imagery and mood needed for the scene.

Bottom line: describing things in new ways is hard work.

It takes time and brainpower and more words than using the expected phrasings. But the payoff is multi-faceted, resulting in descriptions that do double duty, reveal something unexpected, and wow the reader. Your new phrasings may be somewhat awkward at first. But with practice, turning a unique phrase will get easier and become a more natural part of your style.

If you’d like to try your hand at rewriting some well-used phrases, here are some examples to play with. Use the techniques mentioned above and see what you can do with one of the following:

• Belinda was so mad she could spit nails
• Sunburned skin
• A little black dress
• A dilapidated house

Feel free to share your results in the comments. I’d love to see what you come up with.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post 11 Techniques for Transforming Clichéd Phrasings appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Every genre and medium of storytelling uses tropes, common themes or story devices. For example, a popular trope in the romance genre is “enemies to lovers,” where the characters start as enemies before falling in love.

Most articles we come across in the writing world discuss avoiding tropes. After all, they can be the result of lazy writing and lead to predictability in our stories.

However, tropes aren’t all bad. In fact, we usually can’t avoid including at least a few in our writing. So how can we make tropes work for our story?

Why Can’t We Completely Avoid Tropes?

Tropes are some of the building blocks of storytelling. No matter which way we turn with our story’s draft, that choice likely plays into a trope.

For example, let’s say we need to add stakes or an element of character growth to our hero’s motivation before the big showdown at the climax. There’s a good chance that whatever event we choose to enact that change is a trope:

• Mentor dying? That’s a trope.
• Loved one threatened? Trope
• Ultimatum from someone with power? Trope
• And so on…

Stories are made of tropes in the same way that trees are made of wood. We can’t avoid tropes because they’re part of what we use to build our stories.

So Why Does Advice Warn Us about Tropes?

Given that tropes are a normal element of storytelling, why does most advice focus on avoiding them? Like with any aspect of writing, we can fall into lazy habits when it comes to tropes.

Being lazy with the use of tropes means that we end up with a too-predictable story. Or that we’re relying so much on trope formulas that the story itself fails to show rather than tell. In short, a lazy use of tropes can lead to boring, unengaging, and formulaic stories, not to mention disappointed readers.

For example, a common trope with sports or team-focused stories is that a group of underdog misfits manages to win an important competition against all the odds. A lazy use of the trope would set up the situation of the underdog misfits, throw in a superficial lesson about them learning to value teamwork, and then expect the reader to buy into their sudden success just because everyone knows that’s how the trope plays out.

In other words, tropes are bad when we as storytellers rely on them to carry the work of the story. Just because readers know an enemies-to-lovers romance story ends with the characters getting together, that doesn’t mean the storyteller can skip out on doing the work to show the audience—and make them believe—the characters have actually overcome their incompatible goals and found common ground.

Some Predictability Is Good

The promises at the heart of each genre—happy-ending romances, solved mysteries, and vanquished thriller villains—help define the genre, so it’s obviously not always bad for readers to know how to fill in the blanks. Similarly, story tropes help readers know what kind of story we’re going to tell, what they can expect on our pages.

So we wouldn’t want to avoid all tropes, even if we could, as tropes are often why readers like a story—they want the type of story that comes with that trope. Many romance readers love the enemies-to-lovers trope so much that they pick up any book with that trope. Personally, I’m a sucker for the fake-dating trope in romance stories.

The trick is finding the right balance to that predictability. Readers want to be able to predict our story enough to know that it will appeal to them. But readers also want their expectations met in a surprising way.

3 Ways to Improve Our Use of Tropes

1. Think: Similar But Different

To find the right balance of predictability, we can’t just lazily follow a trope’s formula. We need to take the usual trope ideas and play with them. Twist them. Turn them on their head.

The first Iron Man movie took the superhero origin story and twisted it by making the protagonist unworthy of his powers. Rather than being a relatable every-man, Tony Stark was an anti-hero.

• Layer Tropes to Create Unique Stories

Stories can be less predictable if we use more tropes. Layering story elements and expectations can make them interact in interesting and surprising ways.

The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa layers tons of tropes: office romance (the couple has to work together on a project), forbidden romance (the hero is her ex-fiancé’s brother), enemies-to-lovers (the brother is the one who broke them up…at the altar), fake dating (as they do research for their project), just-one-bed (during said research), and so on. Together, those layers create a unique story with an unpredictable path to the genre’s expected happily ever after.

• Focus on Relatability

Tropes often make our story more relatable to readers. After all, in real life, we go down to the basement to fix the burned-out lightbulb, no matter how many horror movies we’ve seen. Or even if readers haven’t experienced the trope themselves, the predictability of it can still help create that all-important connection between characters and readers.

That’s why tropes can be a marketing point for our book, letting potential readers know what to expect from our story. We might use our story’s tropes to develop the back-of-the-book blurb. Or we might allude to our story’s tropes in marketing materials.

With the right attitude toward tropes, we can improve our storytelling and appeal to readers. *smile* Do you have any questions or insights about tropes and how to use them?

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

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